2. Puget only sells the AMD system with an A4-3400 and the A6-3500.Anandtech can only review pre-assembled systems as the systems are sold, the fact that Anandtech cares to compare such vastly different system is a different debate.Reply

Fine, but it woudl make sense to cobble together their own setup using the best components that still fit same thermal envelope (afteralkl a user might decide to upgrade !). This means fastest 65W APU and fastest memory that is supported by that CPU.Reply

1st, let me mention that I love prebuild reviews, even when I don't have a chance of buying the reviewed system, but I find that this review is lacking or a bit odd.

2nd, Adding a DIY system would be as awkward as the existing comparison, 1750$ prebuild Intel system vs 1400$ prebuild AMD system vs. DIY system with 65 watt CPU system?

I think Dustin has held a good scope by only looking at the top offerings for the Puget Systems Echo an he is very balanced in his praise of both systems.Unfortunately I see no reason to compare performance of these systems, AMD will get a beating on the CPU side, again, and Intels horrible IGP is absent from half the test, again.

3rd, I have not read other Puget system reviews on anand, but I would have preferred the review had an extra page dedicated to the systems and reseller.A large markup is mentioned, but an example of how cheap a DIY person can make it is not shown.Build quality, noise, temperature etc. is leisurely mentioned but never with anything really tangible.I could go on :-/Reply

Yes, but there's time and there's money. In any case, judging by the power usage of the A6-3500 I think it's fair to assume that you can use one of the more powerful variants and still not get anywhere near the 100W ceiling (though I suppose, with the 3850, it'd get close - but we ARE talking the differences mentioned by sabot00 above plus the 157MHz higher GPU clock).Reply

Only problem is finding a A6-3800 which is the Quad Core 65W. Missing Remote tested one, but I can't seem to find one here or in Europe and I haven't tried Asia yet.

I already bought an A6-3500 though and since its an HTPC, it will be more than fine with 1600 speed memory and SSD like featured though smaller (64GB), so maybe with a slight OC and OC the memory I can smoke the benchmarks set here.

There is an A6-3860 which is the revision of the Quad Core but it seems those have all gone to OEM's now.

Guess this fight will continue when Trinity comes out and hopefully a low TDP Quad Core will be widely available.Reply

This is a tired argument and something I've gotten really sick of seeing since I started writing here nearly two years ago. It's very easy to cry foul and scream bias without reading the entire article or thinking about why the material might seem the way it is.

I will say this once to get it out of my system: nobody here is on anyone's payroll. There is no collective site bias. We report what we find. If you feel otherwise, so be it, but I was an AnandTech reader long before I started writing here and I can tell you I wouldn't have stuck around if things weren't honest.Reply

It was a shame they shipped the Llano build with DDR3 1333. As an owner of the A3850, even the jump to 1600 provides a fairly noticeable jump in gaming performance. Did the motherboard allow you to bump up the memory frequency? If not, I guess a decent option would be to get this system with the least amount of RAM possible and then buy 8GB of 1600 for $40 and install it yourself. :)Reply

As mentioned in the article:"Puget hasn't qualified any 8GB DDR3-1600 DIMMs for deployment in any of their builds, and so they erred on memory capacity instead of speed. In conversations via e-mail, they even admitted this was probably a mistake in this instance. The problem is that they also don't offer any 2GB or 4GB DDR3-1600 DIMMs for the AMD-based system, either, when they do have 4GB DDR3-1600 DIMMs qualified for other builds."Reply

Although I am not claiming a bias, it is a real shame you had to test that Llano with crappy 1333. Although I wouldn't recoomend rolling your own system to run in this silly race, I think it would be very enlightening to see how this would do with fast RAM (1800). I myself was really dissappointed after reading how crappy the AMD did in the CPU tests until I got to the end of the article and realized it was slow RAM. Not o be too harsh, but based on the price and poorly conceived system configuration, I'd tend to not buy anything form these guys...

Ditto on my end. These endless accusations of bias and/or corruption devalue hours of work on the part of writers and prevents the reasonable discussions that AT commenters are more than capable of having.Reply

While I cannot disagree with the content of this post, might I suggest that Anandtech staff not respond to critical (errr trolling) comments?

I come to Anandtech for a cold and completely objective look at the consumer technology of today and tomorrow.

Sometimes, it isn't possible to hold an objective discussion with commenters. Impassioned (albeit respectful and 'correct') comments can slowly damage the image of a journalist and their distribution channel.

If this site starts falling apart, I won't have anywhere to go. Can we nip this in the bud? Reply

Clearly Puget is going for two different market segments with each system. It makes perfect sense to me.

The Core i7-2600S is $100 more expensive than the Intel Core i5-2405S, but comes with half the graphics computing power. They simple chose the best CPU performance they could fit in 65W. It would make no sense to have two identical product lines with the only difference for the customer to choose AMD or Intel. So the AMD side is left for the best iGPU performance at hand.

On one line, they are going for low end gaming. On the other, raw computing power. Intel vs AMD is superficial to them. With the mini-gaming rig they also make more $$ as the APU costs $150-70 less.

And please, don't make me laugh.. You could dump 20 Llano cores into the thing and it wouldn't touch Sandy Bridge quad cores. Grow up.Reply

That is true about the AMD cpu used is far from its best, And while the AMD chip has the best GPU of the 2, I'd like to see a "slower" intel chip, be it a i3 or an i5, whatever they have within power envelope that has the HD3000 graphics as that would even the playing field a bit more.

I guess what i would like to see is Anandtech re-doing this comparison but with their own build so as to ensure they get the best parts available, not the best parts this company offers in this form factor. Get the MB/CPU/RAM for each setup and re-use the case, HDD's etc.

Since you have brought up video editing and gaming as the two usage scenarios, I would like to contest that Llano would do the former much slower than SNB. The GPU is not just for gaming, but GPGPU as well. Quite a few editing software today are starting to be heavily OpenCL GPU accelerated - including Sony Vegas and Cyberlink Powerdirector. I would have also mentioned Premiere Pro but it is CUDA only for now, should be OpenCL in the near future. Perhaps you should add a Sony Vegas Pro benchmark to your suite, Sony already have a standard benchmark project available (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuac... and GPUs bring massive gains over CPU-only.

Just a suggestion, as Llano's GPGPU capabilities almost always goes unnoticed, and unfairly so. Yes, not many applications are heavily GPU accelerated today, but video editing is certainly one of them.

It's a pity the A8-3800 isn't available, that would have been pretty great, and much faster than A6-3500 for a small price. Reply

The problem is that GPGPU and dedicated hardware encoding still, to my knowledge, have issues with end quality. If you're just transcoding for the internet or for yourself, they're probably fine, but CPU-only encoding remains the gold standard.

That said, Premiere CS5.5 benefits tremendously from CUDA, but not entirely on the encoding side. Mercury Playback Engine still produces reference quality video, but CUDA accelerates decoding and effects layering on the timeline by a substantial degree, in some cases meaning the difference between editing in realtime and not.

GPGPU has promise but that promise is, presently, nascent on the desktop.Reply

Do note that I am not referring to encoding! On Vegas Pro the entire video processing pipeline is heavily GPU accelerated. Right from decoding to colour space transforms to scaling to transitions/motion graphics to nearly all video effects - nearly everything is GPU accelerated - even before we hit the encoding stage. Much more extensive than Premiere Pro. Do give the benchmark project a try, you might be surprised how far GPGPU has come. Reply

This is bull. As posted by sabot they have plenty of higher powered APU's available up to the newer A8-3800.

This is like cutting off the arms of your opponent and then saying he didnt even throw a punch. I am not saying AMD is better, but this review is skewed so badly that its not even close to worth publishing.Reply

Not to mention the significantly higher power consumption of a quad core CPU at 2.9GHz with much more powerful graphics. Sure, the 38xx series would be preferable, if only you could actually grab hold of them.

The 3870K is available on CCL for £103, but the A6-3500 is a mere £55 from the same site. The only available models available on that site are the A4-3300, A4-3400, A6-3500, A6-3670K and A8-3870K - there is no sign of the 3800 or 3820.Reply

Its not just you, all the major e-tailers don't carry the A8-3800 in North America. The B&M's don't either (Micro Center and Fry's). That's why I got the A6-3500 and called it a day.

An A4-3400 is plenty for HTPC use, does 29/59 and 3D without issues. When you start using 3rd party stuff like MadVR, you may have a few problems with interlaced content as found in Rene's testing on AVS forums.

The Triple Core is the best case scenario of price and performance. It will do what my current system does, only faster (current rig is 5000+ BE) and that's plenty for me.

Seriously people, before you leave angry comments read the ENTIRE article. He addresses your complaints IN the article. As weiran says, it comes down to supply. AMD doesn't have anything better available to buy. My guess is AMD knows the only systems getting AMD chips right now are the cheapest possible systems, so they probably only manufacture a few thousand of their higher end chips; knowing anyone willing to spend that much money on a CPU will probably go with Intel. Why waste the resources on chips that will never sell? At least not for a profit. So they only keep the cheaper CPU's in stock. They have no delusions about the situation they're in; if only their fan-boys were as clear sighted.Reply

We know Intel has the best CPU's as far as performance on the market goes, but Wwat this did show is AMD's IGP is far better than Intels IGP. So it's really a trade off between CPU performance or Graphics performance if you only had those two options in buying a system like this. Things should get a lot better on the CPU side with AMD's APU's with Trinity using AMD's Piledriver Cores instead an old revised version of the Athlon II cores that come with Llano. And not to mention the HD 7000 series on the GPU side that will come along with it.Reply

Problem is you don't game on an IGP; you buy a dedicated graphics card. Also this is HALF the GPU performance of Intel. He says in the article 6 cores compared to the normal 12. So while the AMD gpu is still a little faster, not by much. And not nearly enough to matter. You aren't gonna game on an IGP, so saying AMD wins because their IGP is better for gaming is moronic. Intels chip is better at literally EVERYTHING, even video rendering.Reply

This isn't meant to be a performance machine, it is meant to be a setup for 65W or less. The article points out that whilst the i7 is easily the faster of the two for CPU work (and why shouldn't it be with an extra core advantage, hyperthreading, better turbo, and 8MB L3 cache), in terms of general usage you probably wouldn't notice it that much over the A6-3500. What's more, the AMD machine uses less power and performs far better at gaming. I also feel the need to point out that the HD 2000 requires a clock speed of three times that of the HD6530D yet falls far behind. The HD3000 will help but not enormously so - put simply, only CPU bound games will do better on the Intel side (and we're talking the minority of games). Let's also not forget that Llano performs noticably better with 1600MHz RAM over the 1333 in this build.

I should also mention that, due to the size of the enclosure and the limited power feed, you CAN'T really add a dedicated card to this setup. So, you have to ask yourself - do you want to use the machine for media or productivity? The AMD machine will handle both whilst costing less, whilst the Intel setup will seriously limp through games but excel at anything that doesn't require a GPU (plus it has QuickSync, of course).

A bit cruel to pick out a cheap Llano vs a Sandy Bridge most people would be happy with in their main desktop.

A8-3820 is the fastest Llano inside 65W, and would be vastly quicker than the chip tested.I admit it's probably a pain to get hold of (I was trying to find one a while back), but it's not a fair fight without it..Reply

Ok, so you absolutely cannot game on the Intel system. You can play some games on very low settings and even lower resolutions on the AMD system. Absolutely EVERYTHING else is faster on the Intel system. So, you don't WANT to game on either system. WHY would you choose the AMD system? If you want to game I'm sure a system like this is not your only system. A decent 15" gaming laptop, P151HM for instance. Any desktop that you've built or bought that has a 75 dollar graphics card in it or better. Point being if you want to game you won't do it on either of these. So unless price is all you care about, Intel it is.

Ever since Intel put that video rendering engine on their CPU's, I forget what it's called right now, the one and only reason to ever consider anything AMD sells is if you play video games. The kinds of video games that require a GPU. Even then a given person might choose Nvidia over AMD. I don't want to see them go under, with the recent legal battles they've won that won't be for a while. But things don't look good. I would love nothing more than to build an AMD system, but I haven't been able to justify it since my Athlon XP. (skipped the Athlon 64 (and X2) era of CPU's). Running E8400 and GTX460 in my desktop, Sandy Bridge 2630 and GTX560M in my laptop. Each one suits all my needs in excess. I cannot see myself buying anything AMD, replacing desktop in 6-18 months. Laptops got a few years left on it. Maybe by 2015/2016 AMD will be a viable option??? Probably not:(Reply

Same here, I need to buy some USB stuff since I have DirecTV and internal PCI HDTV Tuners. Just adds to the budget, I really can't afford to spend the extra $135 (Case, USB Combo Tuner, $15 extra for Mini-ITX)Reply

In the review, the power consumption of each platform was tested only under CPU load. This is inaccurate and unfair because the GPU power consumption contributes a lot to heat and detracts from efficiency. A combination of furmark GPU torture test and a CPU intensive load tester is needed to get an accurate measurement of the power consumption of these chips. Reply

Incorrect. The systems are tested under load, CPU and GPU combined. I ran the stress test in AIDA64, stressing the CPU, GPU, and system memory. Previous results used whatever the most stressful situation I could find was to maximize power consumption; sometimes it was Mafia II, sometimes it was Left 4 Dead 2, sometimes it was AIDA64. My goal is consistently to maximize the power consumption, and the CPU and GPU are being stressed in tandem here.Reply

In the review, both CPU fit a 65 watt envelope. While it is true that AMD A8 processors feature more cores and better graphics, they also have a much higher TDP. To my knoweledge, the A6 processor in this review is the fastest or one of the fastest chips that is under 65 watts. Reply

Registered just to post this - this is a SFF with a low noise output and small energy footprint. Why was this not tested as a HTPC, looking at different outputs, image quality analysis between HD2000 and the AMD chip, etc? Seems a lot more likely it will be used hooked up to a TV than as a gaming rig, in my mind.Reply

How DARE you only "lean" towards Llano!! This just shows that Anandtech is an evil Intel SHILL operation bought and paid for with evil Intel Blood Money!

Any *objective* review would never have even considered using parts that aren't blessed by the holy elders of AMD! It's disgusting that you would even write an article that insults AMD by using the word Intel in it! And to have the nerve to suggest that people should choose a system based on their needs instead of just signing over their children and life savings to AMD is absolutely appalling!

I will never read this site again after such a twisted and disgustingly biased article! GOOD DAY SIR!

P.S. --> To the two people who were dumb enough to take this seriously, yes I am joking. It does show that the AMD cultists who constantly bash Anandtech don't have a clue though, they don't realize that the easiest way for Anandtech to give better reviews of AMD products is for AMD to actually make better products.Reply

Quicksync has exactly 0 to do with video decoding, this keeps coming up over and over and it's a little depressing how uneducated most people are. I can (and have) done full H.264 1080P video decoding with a 3 year old Core 2 notebook with x4500 graphics over an HDMI output with audio under Linux, so video playback is a piece of cake.

Quicksync is for video *trans*coding which is 1. usually done offline and 2. often done on a separate box from the HTPC. The HTPC plays back the video *after* transcoding.Reply

A good review. Some of the commentators seem to forget that this is not a processor review rather a system review. Dustin reviewed what was available, it is not his problem that a certain processor is not available for the system rather it is Pudgets.

I actually think this review put AMD in good light. Even though the the processor (possibly also the ram) used in the system was not the best that one can get it still managed to impress the reviewer.Reply

Why wouldn't they go down the road of using a mobile CPU for these types of systems?? They are already using customized motherboards. Seems like there are plenty of Core i7's with HD3000 in the $310 CPU range.Reply

Considering the price differences and the different markets the AMD APU and Intel CPU play at, these results are expected. It would have been nice to see the A8 65W APU with its superior IGP and more cores and higher clock. But that thing is seriously hard to get.

I settled for a A6-3500 in my HTPC. It was much cheaper than any Intel solution at the time, the IGP is more important to me than more CPU power and undervolted it uses about as much juice as any Intel CPU. And this way I can support AMD some and increase competition (I use Intel in my desktop machine and my Laptops).Reply

For me Dustin just writes the best review currently on the web, far from the usual we need 7870 oc to get the job done, that doesnt reflect normal user behavior.

This review, as the others from Dustin, is usufull for recommending solutions for family and friends,except the minor detail i dont think they would care about the next wonder from AMD or Intel the same way we do :)

Our thought process working with Puget was to just crank out the most powerful systems we could on the AMD and Intel sides. What's interesting, I think, and I touched on this a little in the review...you can't really say anything's just "the most powerful" anymore, and the review proves it. As a result, the comparison did suffer a little, but I'd like to think the information gleaned was useful nonetheless.Reply

This was a review of two pre-configured systems. In the end of the article, the author specifically states that there are far more powerful AMD CPUs available in the same power envelope, but they are not readily available, even on NewEgg, and that the manufacturer doesn't add them in as an option.

If I were an AMD fan (and I am...), I would be ecstatic that my admittedly lower-end CPU/GPU combo knocked out the MUCH more powerful i7 CPU/GPU combo for overall usefulness. I believe that competition is absolutely necessary in the CPU space - just look and see how much Intel is sitting on their laurels right now without a really good challenger to their CPU dominance right now, and then look how much work they are putting into the GPU side of things now that AMD has eaten their lunch in that arena. How could you claim that this article was written by an Intel fellow when the parting thought was that he would go with the AMD solution for a system such as this (notebook, HTPC)?

In addition, the author basically chastises the manufacturer for not making better parts available that would take advantage of the AMD's love of memory without even coming close to breaking the power consumption limit.

Come on, guys. We all know that the CPU side of AMD is not the reason people buy APUs. We all know that, until AMD drops the new NetBurst architecture they are trying to push (Bulldozer) and realize that, if Intel failed with that strategy, AMD may just go bankrupt using it, that Intel will DESTROY AMD on the CPU side. We also know that, even with Ivy Bridge, there is a good chance that the GPU side will STILL belong to AMD, even at current Llano builds (there is a previous article from Anand previewing the new Ivy Bridge GPU). There was not a single shock in this article. Why argue well-documented facts at this point....

What do mean they have qualified 1600Hz memory for the Llanos? Tom's already ran its own testing and PNY Xlr8 are the best given the price, availability and performance.

Given faster memory the Llano would put a further smack down on Sandy Bridge graphics and run BF3!

These APU's are perfectly suited for HTPC use, especially given the price of cut down i3's (G-series).

I was wondering if this would run on the 90W power brick Antec gives you. I have A6-3500 waiting for a motherboard and memory. I sort of want to downsize my HTPC which uses a Sonta III case currently. But that would mean buying at least one external device and leaving my poor PCI TV Tuners out to lunch.

All total it would add $80 for the Antec case, $45 for a used 650HD USB Combo Tuner (ATI has better PQ chips!) and $15 for the ASRock board over the Mico-ATX version.

Oh well... Serious Budget Upgrade so I'll likely stick to the original plan. Thanks for the Review.Reply